Charlton Heston’s tablets of stone

EVEN the best actor can occasionally fluff his lines. But some fluffs so distract an audience that it loses the plot. Has Charlton Heston (not one of the greatest actors, but a good one nonetheless) committed such a gaffe? “If there had been even one armed guard in the school,” Mr Heston announced the day after teenage gunmen killed a dozen fellow students, one teacher and finally themselves in a Littleton, Colorado, high school, “he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly.”

Well, actually no. There was indeed an armed guard at Columbine High School, he exchanged gunfire with the teenagers—and he failed to prevent the tragedy. The obvious conclusion is that Mr Heston's script, or at least his sense of timing, has gone awry. But is it equally obvious that the play is ruined, and that Mr Heston is doomed to lasting embarrassment when he presides over this weekend's annual meeting of the National Rifle Association (which, by bitter irony, is being held in Denver)?

Clearly the risk is there: the NRA has resisted the plea of Denver's mayor to cancel the event, but has shortened it from three days to one “to show our profound sympathy and respect for the families and communities in the Denver area in their time of great loss.” Moreover, making the accident of the calendar still riskier for the NRA are the days of televised mourning that have preceded it: heart-wrenching funeral scenes and countless hours of electronic punditry.

Tragedy in Colorado hits home in a way that tragedy in Kosovo does not. Yet, sadly for those Americans dismayed by their society's addiction to guns, the risk to the NRA's standing is probably less than it appears. One reason is that in the land of attention-deficit disorder the media cannot sustain its focus for long. Horrendous acts of schoolboy violence, for example, are regular occurrences, but they fade all too quickly from public memory (the killings by Littleton's “Trench-Coat Mafia” were the seventh such incident to have captured the TV cameras in the past 18 months). The bigger reason, however, is that Mr Heston's script, for all his recent mistakes of timing and delivery, is one that cannot be dismissed out of hand. Instead, it has to be listened to when the actor is on form.

Take, for example, Mr Heston's speech (just four days before the Littleton killings) to the students at Yale. To their parents, Mr Heston is an American icon, somehow embodying the heroism of his roles of yesteryear: Ben Hur in his Roman chariot; Moses bearing aloft God's ten commandments; El Cid defying the Moorish hordes. Today's students are too young to be influenced by such epics (though some will remember Mr Heston's cameo appearance as the boss of the CIA, intimidating Arnold Schwarzenegger in “True Lies”). Perhaps they see simply an old man, further over the hill than Clint Eastwood (a mere 68, compared with 74-year-old Mr Heston) and with a ridiculously poor toupee. But when they listen, they hear one of America most inspiring voices, awakening all the atavistic longing, felt even by the young, for a simpler, better nation:

Here I am still in the chariot... The thought police do not frighten me. I hope I frighten them... I believe that in your heart you already know something is profoundly wrong. When bartenders are responsible for drunk drivers' acts, and gunmakers are responsible for criminals' acts, and nobody is responsible for O.J. Simpson's acts, something is wrong.

Lest this version of “truth and consequences” seem a trifle too rabidly right-wing, Mr Heston reminds his audience that he once marched with Martin Luther King (his critics say his civil-rights activism has grown in the telling). And, lest it seem a trifle simplistic, he reminds them that “passing laws is what keeps politicians' careers alive. Enforcing laws is what keeps you alive.”

It is a shrewd mantra, intoned to discredit even the most modest attempts to restrict Americans' access to weapons of personal destruction. Remember Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill stopping the transfer of handguns by adults to juveniles? “His Justice Department bothered to prosecute only five people in 1997 and six in 1998.” Or the ban on semi-automatic guns? Just four prosecutions in 1997 and four in 1998. Or “that media love-child, the Brady Bill”? Just nine people convicted out of the quarter-million felons who attempted to buy handguns. Look, by contrast, at the NRA way: the imposition of punitive federal law for firearms offences and the right (available now in 31 states) to carry a concealed weapon. The result, say some scholars to the NRA's delight, is both lower crime and better economics (Sterling Burnett of the National Centre for Policy Analysis impressively calculates that the deterrent effect of “defensive gun use” confers a net benefit ranging between $1 billion and $38.8 billion a year).

Say all this enough times and the audience will doubtless forget the distraction of Littleton. When 53% of adults polled—after Littleton—by CBS oppose a ban on the sale of handguns to civilians, this week's call by the Washington Post for just such a ban looks, sadly, like wishful thinking. So too, alas, does the incrementalist approach of that other American actor, Bill Clinton.

This week, in what the Senate Republican leader Trent Lott dismissed as a “typical knee-jerk reaction” to Littleton, the president proposed legislation requiring child-proof locks on all guns sold; background checks on people buying from private dealers at gun shows; a lifetime ban on owning guns for violent juveniles; a three-day waiting period for all handgun purchases, with the minimum buyer age raised from 18 to 21; a ban on the possession by juveniles of semi-automatic assault rifles; and a limit (as in Virginia) on handgun sales to one per person per month.

Can such puny measures really be what the White House calls “the most comprehensive gun legislation in 30 years”? Unfortunately, yes. But, as Mr Clinton pointed out, guns are part of America's culture and cultural change comes hard. Mr Heston's NRA straddles two streams of the nation's consciousness: the huntin' and fishin' of America's idyllic past and rural present, and the “Dirty Harry” violence of its inner cities. What a pity the combination is so durable—and so deadly.